Thoughts on rationalism and the rationalist community from a skeptical perspective. The author rejects rationality in the sense that he believes it isn't a logically coherent concept, that the larger rationalism community is insufficiently critical of it's beliefs and that ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY IS NOT THE TRUE CALIF.

Social Sciences

TruePath12th November 2017

Just Because You Didn't Demand Sex Doesn't Make It Better

The (now confessed) allegations against Louis CK are certainly awful behavior and shouldn’t be tolerated but they raise an interesting issue about the distinction between appropriate punishment and moral harm.

For instance, we set the penalty so high for some crimes (cheating on taxes or insider trading) not necessarily because those crimes are such atrocious moral infractions but because we need sufficiently high penalties to deter that behavior effectively. I’d argue that a similar thing is going on when someone uses their power over someone’s career to extort sexual favors.

Obviously, its morally unacceptable to ruin someone’s career for your own selfish reasons. However, we often tolerate people with power harming the careers of others out of pure pique, spite or other selfish reason. Now the individual moral harm of offering someone a choice (sleep with me or I hurt your career) is no more1 than the harm of simply hurting their career out of spite or pique.

However, this doesn’t mean we should reserve the same level of punishment (and here public condemnation is a form of punishment) for those two behaviors. The unfortunate fact of the situation is that without serious and strong punishment (legal or social) for, even implicitly, conditioning (non-sexual, porn-stars and prostitutes are hard cases) career success on sexual favors we risk creating an environment in which succeeding in an industry requires providing sexual favors. In contrast, when someone with power hurts a career out of spite, pique or on a lark we don’t face the same danger of creating an environment in which some people are systematically disadvantaged (we still face some risk of that). But, at least in an environment where demands for sexual favors aren’t the norm that doesn’t make the harm of the individual act greater.

Anyway, this is all a very long way of pointing out that while we appropriately punish people who condition career advancement on sex more it’s just as morally wrong to harm someone’s career for no reason or because you have some kind of personal or political disagreement with them. No, this is not an attempt to minimize the harm of behavior like that of Louis CK but, rather, to point out its no better when you screw over someone’s career because you dislike their politics, find their voice annoying or any other random (job unrelated) reason.

I realize this claim is arguable but I think it’s true on reasonable psychological assumptions. ↩

TruePath27th October 2017

An Alternative To Me Too

So in response to my criticism of me too someone suggested I should post about an experience I’ve had. I won’t post about a situation where I’ve done something useful to combat sexual discrimination nor extreme violations of the law since that isn’t particularly helpful in my opinion. The goal isn’t to signal moral virtue or share scary stories but, instead, to illustrate the ways in which unfair treatment can hide even in surprising places so we can excise those last remnants of sexism and discrimination.

So the story I’ll convey is about how at an academic institution I attended a friend of mine was repeatedly asked to perform administrative tasks and food provisioning tasks by an elderly professor because of her gender. Certainly, she could have raised a fuss but doing so would have caused her more grief than going along with the situation. What I think is instructive about the situation is that this reflected only the messed up priorities of one member of the faculty but despite this the fact that it was easier for all the other faculty members not to get involved meant that this was all it took.

As far as solutions go I think this illustrates the importance of not simply relying on complains or formal channels to solve these problems. Its important for people to be aware when their colleagues are imposing an unfair policy (gender based or otherwise) and say something. I also think it reveals how some people find they virtually never experience this kind of treatment and other people experience it frequently. While I don’t think it would have mattered in this case (female victims were in short supply here), I can easily imagine that a less stubborn/crotchety instigator would specifically target those individuals who seemed least likely to report/complain.

Anyway I’ve kept details vague to avoid identifying anyone but this is the kind of description I felt would be helpful as opposed to merely ‘me too’.